Bondi is going to be confirmed. She is going to be the attorney general. That’s when her real challenges start.
Bondi is going to be confirmed. She is going to be the attorney general. That’s when her real challenges start.
B arring something unforeseen, former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi will be the next attorney general of the United States. She is a solid pick — as solid as it can get in light of President-elect Trump’s apparent vision for the Justice Department. That doesn’t make her an ideal pick, but she doesn’t have to be ideal, just confirmable. She is that, thanks to the six-seat majority Republicans will hold in the Senate starting in January.
Nevertheless, expect her to face a tough grilling from Judiciary Committee Democrats, some of it fair, some not.
Here, Bondi has the advantage that all Republicans get from today’s Democrats — anti-Trump obsessives in the thrall of their woke-progressive base: In person, she will seem the antithesis of the “Hitler’s aider and abettor” she’ll be portrayed as. She is not actually going to tote handcuffs to her confirmation hearing, ready to frog-march newly minted senator Adam Schiff down Capitol Hill and off to the nearest federal pokey — where you’re to believe the rest of Trump’s new posse will already have rounded up Liz Cheney, Hillary Clinton, Jim Comey, Alvin Bragg, Michael Cohen, and the rest of his erstwhile tormentors.
If you think I’m exaggerating about how the Democratic cohorts are exaggerating, check out this post-election Politico analysis listing the many targets of Trump’s supposedly imminent “retribution” campaign. It happens every time: Trump trolls the media-Democrat complex with “retribution” and other servings of MAGA red meat, then they spin it up to eleven on the rage meter, which only helps the now-president-elect.
It’s what got him elected. And please don’t tell me I’m part of the cult, offering eight-dimensional-chess explanations of how Trump always outfoxes his opposition. A child could play this game. Plus, for the Left, the Trump Agonistes bit is both fun and profitable. That’s why we’re in the ceaseless loop.
As for Pam Bondi, those saying the case for her is that she’s not Matt Gaetz are badly underestimating her. (And, as Trump really did want Gaetz at the DOJ, the eight-dimensional-chess story that he picked Gaetz knowing it would blow up and thus ease the path for the “real” nominee is inane.)
Bondi was a successful in-the-trenches prosecutor in Tampa before being elected state attorney general — one of the biggest AG jobs in America. She had such a good run that she was easily reelected — and would have been elected again if she hadn’t been term-limited.
One rap on her from the Left — see Politico, supra — is that she ended the state AG’s practice of siding with consumers in litigation battles against utilities. In truth, that suggests she’s thoughtful. The Left seeks to inculcate a zero-sum class consciousness: If utilities are taking some action, the proletariat must be getting screwed. Sometimes yes, sometimes no — and when it’s yes, it’s usually unnecessary for the state to sue because the activists have plenty of lawyers and will find better plaintiffs. The “consumer protection” practice Politico describes put me in mind of the New York law, championed by progressives, that empowers the state AG to sue on behalf of consumers bilked by corporate fraudsters. In the hands of an ambitious progressive politician, such as AG Letitia James, this “consumer protection” law became the cudgel for a partisan fraud-case-with-no-fraud victims lawsuit against the Democrats’ nemesis, Trump — a suit that had nothing to do with protecting consumers.
Bondi, by contrast, abandoned the consumer-protection racket on the theory that Floridians were more concerned about crime and human trafficking. That’s exactly what Trump wants at the DOJ: first, an end to the creative stretching of statutes by clever prosecutors in pursuit of the Left’s political adversaries and preferred targets — energy companies, successful businesses, police departments, red states, et al.; second, a repurposing of those resources to combat real crime — especially the gang crime that is making parts of Democratic-run cities unlivable, fueled in part by the explosion of illegal immigration wrought by the Biden-Harris border collapse.
On that score, the media-Democratic complex is doing it again: trying to gaslight the public into the conceit that the public loves migrants and is aghast at “Trump’s mass deportation” plans. It doesn’t . . . and it’s not. And Trump knows this.
Perhaps you haven’t heard, but the government is broke — running a $2 trillion-plus annual deficit and expending more on debt service than the armed forces. Trump likes to talk about “mass deportation” in part because it makes all the right people hysterical, but mostly because a majority of the public would like to see significant deportation. Common sense says this would reverse the incentives that have caused mass illegal immigration, leading many “migrants” who shouldn’t have come to go back home and many more not to come in the first place.
Alas, there are insufficient law-enforcement assets to execute deportation on a very significant scale, let alone en masse, even if Trump tapped some military resources for the purpose — which he likes saying he’ll do because he’s a diva and it makes Democrats’ heads explode. There are over 11 million aliens illegally present in the United States, and Congress funds only about 30,000 spaces for detaining them. You can’t do mass arrests absent commensurate holding facilities, and you won’t have commensurate holding facilities (to say nothing of the rest of the administrative infrastructure necessary for processing millions of removal cases) unless it is funded — which it won’t be in anything close to the amount required.
So for all the histrionics, the best anyone can hope for is a tiered approach that prioritizes criminal aliens, especially alien gangs. “But wait a minute,” Democrats say, “that’s what Obama and Biden and Harris and Senate bipartisan reformers wanted to do, and you people objected to it.” Au contraire. Democrats and their fellow travelers wanted to prioritize criminal aliens as a head fake for giving de facto amnesty — and, gradually, de jure amnesty — to the remaining millions. What Trump can do, with the help of Bondi and Tom Homan, the putative border czar (whatever that non-existent office may entail), is prioritize criminal aliens while warning the rest that they are not getting amnesty. They should go home, and if their efforts to remain in this country happen to draw the attention of government agencies, they will be subject to arrest and deportation. The point is to change behavior by changing incentives.
There is mass deportation and there is self-deportation. Democrats would like you to believe the former is imminent while the latter is laughably unrealistic. The truth is more likely the opposite.
Bondi can do two big things to help. First, she can make clear that Homan is absolutely right (as I observed earlier this week): Sanctuary city officials who take affirmative steps to interfere with federal agents’ execution of Congress’s immigration laws will be prosecuted for felony harboring. Progressive Democrats admire cities that provide sanctuary against enforcement of laws progressives don’t like; the public, to the contrary, likes the laws to be followed — and equal protection for all, not special protection for willful law-breakers. Second, Bondi can announce that, in a break from the Biden-Harris administration that brought lawsuits on behalf of aliens to the detriment of American civil rights, the Trump-Vance administration will elevate American civil rights — whether it’s for voters who object to their votes’ being diluted by noncitizens, for citizens who want free speech and safe streets, or for Jewish students who simply want to walk across college campuses without being harassed and intimidated by Hamas supporters.
As noted above, Bondi is not going to have smooth sailing. Trump didn’t take my advice (imagine that!) and appoint as AG a lawyer who never served as his personal attorney (Bondi represented Trump in the 2019 Ukraine impeachment). Consequently, she will face more pressure than the quotidian Trump loyalist to recuse herself from any investigations in which he is allegedly implicated — i.e., to appoint a special prosecutor. (Again, Trump is not good at chess, in any dimensions: By picking his personal lawyers to run the DOJ and thus setting up ethical quandaries for them, he making it easier, not harder, for his mischievous foes.)
Bondi’s exalted position in Trump’s circle has come at the mandatory cost of insisting that he won the 2020 election, including the “stop the steal” hijinks. She is going to be pressed on that. In 2013, moreover, she asked for and received a $25,000 donation from Trump, after which she declined to have the Florida AG’s office join the New York AG’s fraud suit against Trump University despite the large number of Floridians who were said to be victimized. (Trump’s donation was provided to a Bondi PAC via a tax-exempt Trump foundation that was later dissolved over various irregularities.) Right after he was elected president in 2016, Trump settled the outstanding Trump University suits by paying $25 million. Both he and Bondi have denied any connection between Trump’s political contribution and Bondi’s decision not to join the suit.
She is going to be asked about these things. None of them, though, is going to be an insuperable hurdle. Bondi is going to be confirmed. She is going to be the attorney general. That’s when her real challenges start.
Bondi is a very experienced state prosecutor, an administrator who has run a large bureaucracy, and a lawyer-lobbyist who knows the worlds of commerce and federal legislation. Yet, she doesn’t know the Justice Department. It can be a tough place for a stranger: an institution that can be arrogantly self-conscious about its icons, traditions, and practices; and one that teems with smart, public-spirited lawyers, a subset of whom are willful, partisan careerists — the kind who figure that they, not their politically appointed superiors, are what make the DOJ tick, and who are not above tripping up an AG they don’t care for in order to embarrass a president they despise.
Case in point: Alberto Gonzales. He came to the DOJ with a long career in Texas as a prominent lawyer, secretary of state, and a judge of the state’s highest court; very close to George W. Bush, for whom he’d been counsel when Bush was governor, Gonzales came to Washington in 2001 as the White House counsel. He seemingly had every advantage: a close confidant of the president who had been instrumental in appointments to both the DOJ and the federal bench. But Gonzales didn’t know the DOJ, and when Bush’s foes made their move, he never saw it coming. He was eaten alive by a faux scandal over the firing of a handful of U.S. attorneys — which presidential administrations have the absolute right to do (and which Bush’s predecessor, Bill Clinton, had done across the board without consequence). It was the scandal about nothing, but Democrats and their bureaucratic allies ran him out of town over it.
I hope Pam Bondi proves to be a terrific attorney general. I also hope she hires strong DOJ veterans as her chief of staff and advisers. Contrary to the president-elect’s suspicions, plenty of such people, even if they are not Trump loyalists, want the DOJ reformed and de-politicized. The new AG will need their help to avoid the pitfalls as she tries to accomplish the mission.